The Anomaly Report

Seriously dude, I love spirals.

… a new beginning. This blog is the second life of AnomalyReport.com, a Tumblr I began sometime back with the intention of collecting real ghost stories.

I grew tired of the Tumblr for a number of reasons: people can’t write, so the editing process was often tedious and exhausting; some stories were clearly bullshit, in spite of admonitions to tell what really happened (I know, amazing, right?); I have a lot of other blogging to do, some of it for pay; something about the blog just didn’t fit with Tumblr’s blogging-meets-social networking vibe at all.

So tonight I realized I needed to just go ahead and do something I’ve been playing around with for quite some time – write a paranormal blog covering anything weird – any “anomaly” – that pops up in the news.

There are a lot of blogs like this out there. A lot of web sites. The Web loves spooky stories, tales of UFOs and Bigfoot. How will this one stand out?

For one thing, I’ll still collect stories from people to post here. That’s not all that new, I give you that. For another, I’m not the most rock-ribbed believer in the world. I’m not a Joe Nickell-style skeptic. I don’t approach every single story assuming it’s bullshit. But I am, by trade, an investigative journalist. That means that I fully intend to occasionally pick a story apart at the seams and see what’s really going on inside it.

I’m also not the most serious guy in the world. This is important, to me. In my perusal of phenomenae-inspired media I’ve noted a distinct lack of humor, especially from bloggers and writers. I hope I can change that.

I’ve learned in another arena that there are drawbacks to a blog being too narrow-focused. Therefore, while this blog will certainly focus mostly on news stories and sometimes spooky or strange tales from history, it will also cover paranormal-themed television. There’ll be media criticism related to paranormal subjects, maybe even reviews of various supernaturally-inspired shows, with an emphasis on supernatural “reality” (a potential oxymoron from hell, I know) television.

And really, I’ll cover other weird stuff as I see fit too, even if it doesn’t at first seem somehow “paranormal” in nature.

So stay tuned while I get my shit together and get the URL pointed this way.